What does TIME+ (cpu time, hundredth) in top mean?

Question

See the example below. Automount is showing 3019:57 in the TIME+ column.

Tasks: 241 total,   1 running, 240 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.7%us,  0.7%sy,  0.0%ni, 98.5%id,  0.0%wa,  0.1%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:  16435884k total, 15007668k used,  1428216k free,   454300k buffers
Swap: 33554424k total,      140k used, 33554284k free,  1915400k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
**27026 root      15   0  974m  12m 1616 S  3.3  0.1   3019:57 automount**
 4619 root      15   0  245m  24m 9444 S  2.0  0.1   3491:25 java
20515 root      15   0 15720 1532 1124 R  0.7  0.0   0:00.03 top
    1 root      15   0 10372  644  548 S  0.0  0.0   0:04.87 init
    2 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   2:49.80 migration/0
    3 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   1:20.90 ksoftirqd/0
    4 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0
    5 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   3:53.73 migration/1
    6 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:34.51 ksoftirqd/1

Does it mean it has spent an accumulated 3019 hours of CPU time?

Solution 1

Haven't looked at the source code of top, but it seems like 3019:57 in column TIME+ means 3019 minutes 57 seconds of accumulated CPU time.

• 999:00.00 means 999 minutes
• 1000:00 means a thousand minutes (no . separator at all)

I confirmed it on my system. I took an example process from top with 2529:38 then checked it with ps -fp PID which showed 1-18:09:38. The latter is one day and eighteen hours, which is approximately two and a half thousand minutes. Hence it equals the former.

Solution 2

the TIME+ column in TOP command, is not in minutes, is in hundredths of a second. source: https://www.maketecheasier.com/linux-top-explained/

greetings

Comments

[Trevor]

This is incorrect and meaningless. The time column has a colon separating two values so saying it is any one unit makes no sense. What the manual page (and your link) are saying is that the TIME+ column has a granularity of hundredths of a second. The units are still minutes:seconds, you just get fractions of seconds as well after the decimal point. These fractions of seconds have a granularity of hundredths of seconds, hence there are at most two digits after the decimal point.